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"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara star in director David Fincher's American version of the global bestseller about an unlikely crime-fighting duo trying to solve a 40-year-old murder. Opens Dec. 21. (Published Wednesday, May 30, 2012)

Despite the appearance of being a box-office disappointment, Sony insists that they're moving ahead with the sequel to "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." And why wouldn't they?

The expectations for "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" were astronomical. An adaptation of the global bestseller starring James Bond, directed by David Fincher and featuring music by Trent Reznor is, at first blush, a recipe for big money.

But let's frame it another way: a story about a woman raped by her parole officer, who then reciprocates in spades with a ruthless sodomization, helps a journalist--recently convicted of libel--investigate a family of Nazis to solve the disappearance of a young girl--Merry Christmas!

"Dragon Tattoo" is a great film, as good as you'd hope given the talent involved, but it's a dark brooding film that explores the very worst of human nature, not exactly the kind of thing you run to to boost your spirits during a dreary holiday season. And yet, the film has already made $60 million domestically, and should easily recoup its $90 million budget by next weekend, if not earlier. And this is with the film having barely opened across Europe, where it's sure to do as well if not better than it has here.

Sony is happy enough with things that they've told EW that the film "continues to do strong business and nothing has changed with respect to development of the next book."

The studio already has Steve Zaillian working on the script for the next film, and they wisely signed all the principals to three-picture deals, so we're confident we can look forward "The Girl Who Played With Fire" sometime in 2013.

Except, maybe this time they won't try to sell it to us as holiday escapism fare.